“If you live in the South, climate change could kill your economy – Northern states might actually profit as the planet warms.”
“The study takes six factors—temperature, rainfall, the effect of carbon dioxide on agriculture, mortality, crime, and labor and energy demand—and models them out to see how climate change will affect the American economy on the county level. They estimate that each 1.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature will reduce the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.2 percent. But that cost won’t be borne equally. Areas in New England and the Pacific Northwest might actually experience a slight economic gain, while places in the American South are likely to experience significant economic damage. Climate impacts could diminish Union County’s income, for example, by 27 percent—as heat-related deaths and crime take a bite out of any increased agriculture.”
“‘The current suite of computer models that are used actually treat the entire United States as a single unit, as though all the impacts that are going to be received are going to be received, on average, the same to everyone,’ study author James Rising, an environmental modeler in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, told PopSci.”
Read the full article in Popular Science HERE.
Dr. Rising’s research was also written about in this article from the Houston Chronicle.